A stylish but brief platformer where air-dashing and the style mechanic take center stage, focusing more on navigating tricky platforming than fighting enemies.
You play as David, a laid-back guy cruising down the road in a sleek red sports car, under a clear, star-filled sky with an ‘80s soundtrack setting the mood. But out of nowhere, an ominous castle materializes directly in your path, and you crash right into it. The bad news is that the castle belongs to Dracula, and he claims your car as payment. But the good news is that you’ve got the skills to get it back.
The controls stick to the standard platformer setup, and they’re simple and intuitive with no complex inputs. You can move, jump, dash (including air-dashing), and attack. Everything feels tight and responsive, so if you’re struggling, it won’t be because of the controls.
Gameplay focuses on pure, no-frills action. There’s no exploration, no hidden secrets, no collectibles, and no ability upgrades. The journey through Dracula’s castle is entirely linear, filled with rooms combining platforming and combat. You can go back to a previous room, but there’s no reason to do that.
The platforming ramps up quickly. You'll spend more time executing precise jumps and air-dashes than fighting enemies. The central mechanic here is called Style. Air-dashing through a fire skull or weak enemy grants you a Style Point, which lets you jump or dash again, but only while airborne. Once you touch the ground, your Style Point resets to zero.
As you move forward, each stage introduces new hazards, like platforms that fall after a few seconds, spikes with shifting patterns, annoying invincible ghosts that chase you through multiple rooms, and locked doors that require keys scattered nearby. Despite how it sounds, the path is still linear because you need to grab all keys if you want to move forward.
Enemies are present but repetitive across all stages. Most go down with a couple of sword swings, and you can even deflect their projectiles back at them. Only one of them requires strategy because it carries a shield you can take out by crouch-attacking. Boss fights, only three in total, aren’t too tough. You might die a few times learning their patterns, but aside from the final boss, none change up their tactics.
Defeated enemies drop crystals and hearts, and occasionally a VHS tape that grants an extra life. Crystals have a single use: collect 50 to gain an extra life. Hearts are more crucial. You start with seven, and each can be filled twice, effectively giving you 14 hearts. But they can vanish quickly thanks to a cheap mechanic that nullifies invincibility, potentially launching you from one hazard into another, or worse, into a pit that instantly costs a life.
Stages include checkpoints that restore your default seven hearts and act as respawn points if you die. Losing a life brings enemies back, though you won’t earn more crystals for defeating them again. You can, however, still pick up hearts or VHS tapes.
Thankfully, the game doesn't require you to finish it all in one sitting. You can quit and resume from your last checkpoint at any time. If you lose all your lives, you can hit “Retry” to restart the current stage. But there’s a nasty bad news: choosing “Quit” after losing all your lives triggers a nasty bug that breaks the save system.
Normally, you can click your save to reload from your latest checkpoint. After triggering this bug, your save file becomes unclickable and your progress erased, and the other two slots get overwritten with unknown saves from before the game’s release. None of the save slots are usable.
To fix it, you’ll need to disable Steam cloud saving and manually delete the game’s settings and save folder. If you leave cloud saving on, it’ll just keep restoring the broken data every time you launch the game. This might not feel like a big deal if you’re early in the game, but if it happens near the end, it’s incredibly frustrating.
